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Ranger ousts SPC from Region V tournament

South Plains College’s defense of last year’s NJCAA championship is over.

With 4.7 seconds left, Tylor Okari Ongwae made two free throws sandwiched around two timeouts, lifting Ranger College past South Plains 80-79 Thursday in the first round of the men’s NJCAA Region V tournament.

Ranger, which won the Northern Texas Junior College Athletic Conference by three games, is 20-11. The Rangers will play No. 22 New Mexico Junior College (25-6) at 5 p.m. Friday in a semifinal at the Rip Griffin Center.

The Texans, 36-0 last year, finished 22-8.

“I’m pretty disappointed right now at the way we played today,” South Plains center Yanick Moreira said. “I thought we had a chance, but we don’t play like we want to. We don’t play like a national champ, so we lost today.”

In a seesaw second half, South Plains took a 79-78 lead on a Moreira jumper in the lane with 17 seconds left. After an immediate timeout, Ranger came down and Okari Ongwae had a shot blocked by Moreira, but got the ball back and was fouled.

After a South Plains timeout, Okari Ongwae’s first free throw bounced high off the back of the rim and dropped in. The Texans called time again, and Okari Ongwae made his second free free throw for a team-high 17 points. South Plains then threw away the inbound pass and its shot to get back to Hutchinson, Kan.

“Every season’s a new season,” South Plains coach Steve Green said. “If there’s any kind of lesson at all, one doesn’t necessarily carry over to the next.

“It was a difficult chore this year. The things we could do easy last year, we just couldn’t do this year. We were not an exceptionally good shooting team.

“We shot well enough to win tonight. We just couldn’t stop them when we absolutely needed to. I can see them driving past us and laying it up time after time after time.”

Ranger played 11 non-conference games this season against teams from the Western Junior College Athletic Conference, the perceived stronger of the two leagues. The Rangers lost eight but beat Odessa, Midland and Western Texas and, when the stakes went up, they added the SPC skin.

“This one you can put on top,” said Ranger assistant coach Robert Reid, who spent much of his 14-year NBA career with the Houston Rockets.

All the Region V games are being broadcast on the Internet, and within minutes of the Rangers’ win Reid said his cell phone “blew up” with congratulatory text messages from former teammates, Moses Malone among them.

In the final 9:02, the lead changed hands 12 times and the widest margin was four points.

Moreira, in his final game for South Plains, tortured Ranger just as he did in the season opener. The 6-foot-10 center scored 28 points and grabbed 10 rebounds, reminiscent of his career-high 32-point, 12-rebound effort back on Nov. 2 in the Texans’ season opener.

South Plains won that game 97-80, but the Texans were in trouble throughout the second half Thursday, much of it due to fouls.

Forward Anthony Walker picked up his third and fourth fouls in the first minute of the second half. Moreira got his fourth with 12:17 left, then sat for five minutes, and shooting guard Kendahl Amerson got his fourth foul with 7:25 to go and sat until teammate Brandon Neel picked up his fourth foul at the 1:19 mark.

Point guard Devonte Smith also spent nearly the entire second half on the bench.

Moreira said he still should have willed the Texans to the win.

“That was all my fault,” he said. “I should be taking care of my team. I should be the one telling my team what to do. My point guard, Devonte (Smith), he’s sick. That was all me. That was a lot of pressure on me. I’m proud of the way my teammates played.”